Spec Ops: The Line a story-driven shooter

Sand may not seem imposing. We walk on it. Children play in it. When we go to the beach, it gets stuck inside our shoes, shorts and backpacks. The most pain sand can inflict is burning your feet on a 100-degree summer day.

But in Spec Ops: The Line, Yager Development comes up with new ways to make it threatening. They’ve used the lavish city of Dubai as a setting. The Mideast paradise, once the place for the obscenely rich, has been destroyed by a series of sandstorms.

Amid this ruin, players take on the role of Capt. Martin Walker, a special forces leader who commands a Delta Force squad. They’re sent on a rescue mission to save Col. John Knrad, one of the founding members of the special forces, and his men. They apparently stayed behind to save civilians, but things aren’t what they seem.

Echoing another Conrad, this one is Joseph. The story seems like it’s set up to resemble Heart of Darkness. In the demo I saw, the player is looking for another man named Gould, who was apparently another person sent to rescue Konrad. But the sand and Dubai does something to you, and he seemed to become unhinged in the desert.

To get to him though, players have to fight off scavangers who have descended up on the riches of Dubai. There’s some pretty horrific images of dead bodies in cars and wrecked roadsters on the streets. At first glance, the third-person shooter seems pretty standard.

But that changes when players see Walker and his team engage in combat shooting between cars and barriers. Smart gamers can use the environment to their advantage by shooting girders holding the sand back. This causes the desert to collapse on enemy positions, effectively killing them.

While all this is happening, players can press the LB button to command his squad. This creates some strategy as Walker sets up ambushes for patrolling troopers. It seems more evolved than what I’ve seen in other games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. In addition, players will also have to deal with civilians along with looters and commandoes.

But what will separate Spec Ops: The Line from other shooters though is the sense of narrative depth and the unique setting. There’s plenty of opportunity to juxtapose the exorbitant world of Dubai with the ruin that befalls it. They’ll see great air-conditioned malls inundated with sand. There’ll be exotic animals of the stuffed variety stuck in an abandoned plazas. Mix this in with scenes where player have to make tough decisions and you end up with a dark adventure.

Apparently, the structure could accommodate branching storylines as players make the decision and change the outcome of the game. There’ll be multiple endings as Walker faces some harsh choices where there doesn’t seem to be a positive way out of a predicament.

Along with the single-player element, fans can expect multiplayer modes. There’s also some co-op planned though Yager officials didn’t give much detail on that. But there’s definitely enough there to pique fans’ interest when the shooter releases next year.